Saving Our Infrastructures

According to Better Roads Magazine's 2008 annual survey of state Departments of Transportation for bridge inventory data, 24.3% of the nation's bridges are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. This number increases from 24.1% in 2007. The statistics shows that the nation's infrastructure continues to crumble. The collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge on August 1, 2007 apparently made the headline news not only in the United States, but also the entire world. This bridge failure is known to the public because of the size of the structure and the magnitude of the casualty. However, this for sure has not been the only bridge failure case and it will not be the last one if the bridge engineering community does not do a better job. In addition to many long span bridges like the I-35W Bridge, We also have a larger number of smaller bridges. Many smaller bridges also contain deteriorations/defects that could lead to failure of the bridges if they are not fixed in time. Bridge engineers' ability to identify problems during bridge inspection is, no doubt, critical to the safeguard of our bridge structures. Reporting a critical defect in time to the authority is also very important to avoid any possible immediate failure of bridge structures. This paper uses two cases to illustrate the importance of visual bridge inspections. One case is the failure of a column in the I-95 Viaduct in the City of Philadelphia. The other case is the rapid deterioration of non-composite adjacent box beam bridges.